BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION:
Cheryl Hicks has been published in Crate, Halfway Down the Stairs, Southern Hum, The Best of the First Line: Editors’ Picks 2002-2006, Families: The Frontline of Pluralism, The Remembrance Project at Howard University, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Other Poetry (UK), Juice, Poems-For-All, Literal Translations, Toward the Light (Canada), The Sigurd Journal, Ginosko, Eskimo Pie, Urban Spaghetti, Blue Fifth Review, Heliotrope, Makar, Snakeskin (UK), HerCircle, The Orphan Leaf Review (UK), the delinquent (UK), Autumn Sky Poetry, Silent Actor, Avatar Review, Word Riot, Clockwise Cat, Halfway Down the Stairs, Monkey Kettle (UK), Washington Literary Review, Shakespeare’s Monkey Review, and Unquiet Desperation (UK). She has been a featured poet at C/Oasis, is a previous recipient of the Paddock Poetry Award and presented poems from her series titled Conversations with the Virgin at the 2006 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Conference in Tucson, Arizona.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My art focuses on those aspects of personality that people sometimesattempt to obscure or skew in an effort to be accepted by society. In keeping with the creation of avisual veil, technically speaking, my art borrows from the theory ofpointillism and the digital effects of photographic half-toning. It is very much a product of pop culture. Covered with one-inch “dots” cut from magazines,my large paintings are couched behind a montage overlay of juxtaposed,equidistant grains. On the physicalplane, the painted image lies behind the dot matrix, but at times the viewer’seye shifts and the dots recede, effectively pulling the viewer in for a closerlook at the small, sampled spots. This visual manipulation alters theoriginal image in much the same way granular synthesis alters an auditoryrecording. Playing on the visualdichotomy of high and low frequencies, the result is simultaneously adeconstructed visual cloud as well as a series of individual images spaced atequal intervals, which are constantly combined and averaged by the human eye tocreate the resulting residual effect. My mixed media canvases alsocontain an almost subliminal visual and psychological “subtext.” For example, the sepia toned painting of mymother, titled “A Revisionist History of Glenda,” is covered withvibrantly colored dots cut primarily from fashion magazines. I did this in an attempt to “refashion” mymother’s morbidly unhappy life.
Hicks’ art has been shown across Texas and in New York, and her collages have appeared in CELLA’s Round Trip, Anti-, Atticus Review, Blue Print Review, and Creative Soup. Her mixed media work was featured at the Fort Worth Contemporary in July 2008.
